The Leading Fan Blog for The Voice

You know that they can sing – but who are these artists who make up the new class of The Voice? I recently talked with some the first performers to make it through blind auditions: Terry McDermott (Team Blake), Devyn DeLoera (Team Christina), Bryan Keith (Team Adam), Daniel Rosa (Team Cee Lo) and Joe Kirkland (Team Adam). Here’s a little more from each of them.

“The flight home was actually going through my mind,” admitted Terry (@TerryMacMusic), who was the first artist to make a team in Season 3, but it came down to the wire. “I think you kind of see it on the television I go for the last note on the track and I look up, and at that point the last thing I’ve seen is that there are no chairs turned around. I’m like ‘Oh well, that’s it then. Free flight home leaving tomorrow.’ I finished the note and I looked down and there’s three chairs turned around. I’m like ‘Okay, I’ll just put the bags on hold then!'”

As for why he chose to join Team Blake? Chalk that up to “Blake’s approach – he’s very supportive and he’s very hands-on. I got that impression from watching the previous season. There’s a very encouraging atmosphere when he’s working with his artists, a very positive, nurturing sense. That really carried over with me. I wanted to embrace that, I wanted to grab that if I could.”

With a laugh, he added, “Plus my wife’s an enormous country music fan and has worked on converting me, so she would have been mad at me if I hadn’t gone with Blake!”

Speaking of fans, Devyn (@DevynDeLoera) spoke of how her coach, Christina Aguilera, was an influence on her and how she reflected that influence in her choice to perform Christina’s “Ain’t No Other Man” in her blind audition. “Christina has inspired me,” she explained. “She’s a very strong woman and she stands up for what she believes in. She’s a strong vocalist. And I think she’s a very admirable celebrity because she keeps her personal life personal and she does her business. That was really inspiring. I’ve always looked up to her since I was a little kid.

“And that’s a song off of my favorite album of hers. I chose that song because I figured she would either love me or hate me, but I was willing to take the risk in case she loved me.” Now that Devyn is a pround member of Team Christina, we know the answer to that question.

“I was watching the show and I was like ‘I don’t even remember half the things that happened,’ confessed Daniel (@DanielRosaMusic), who made The Voice history by being the first artist to be turned down in one season, then come back and make it to the blind auditions a second time. This time, he was luckier and made Team Cee Lo. Asked what he was thinking when he saw chairs turn around, he said “I completely forgot what I was singing at that point. After that, it was just memories from then on.”

He reiterated a point he made on the show Monday, which is that he has no hard feelings from his experience before – in fact, he saw it as something positive and took the coaches’ constructive criticism to heart. “The greatest thing that ever could have happened to me was to not make it on the show last season,” he explained. “I know that last season helped me so much to get here. I feel like a completely different person from last season, so I think that’s really going to help me through.” Would that we all could take rejection as well as Daniel did.

Having also faced rough times with his band, Artist vs. Poet, Team Adam’s Joe (@joekavp) agreed that sometimes the negative can become a blessing in disguise. “The industry is extremely, extremely cutthroat,” he said, “and it was honestly a very difficult time just because we honestly were given everything. We were a favorite on the label, and once everything went down it was just like ‘Who are you again?’ It literally went from love to like nothing.

“It’s extremely, extremely ruthless, but being told no is probably the best thing that can happen to someone in their career, because it straightens you up and it makes you figure out what you need to do. That’s what happened to us and we couldn’t be more grateful.”

He also explained why he chose Adam as his coach: “I know a lot about his history; he actually used to not be a front man, and I kind of really enjoyed the thought of him helping me figure out how to exactly be that front man. He comes from the same music-style background that I do. I felt like he’s the one who could teach me the most, so it honestly seemed like a perfect fit.”

Joe’s teammate on Team Adam is Bryan Keith (@BryanPeeps), who was the first Season 3 artist to have all four coaches want him on their team. Of having the entire panel vying for his talent, he said, “I kept picturing it to happen that way and it happened that way. It felt like a dream really coming true right in front of me. Watching it with my family and friends just really put things into perspective and made me feel like I reached my goal.

“We knew what we were getting ourselves into by joining the show. And we started to just realize that this is like us leaving our mark; this is our chance to go out there, and this could be our last shot and we would just go for it.”

It was Joe who reaffirmed a sentiment many, many artists have spoken when it comes to The Voice: that this isn’t like any other singing competition before or since. “I checked it out and I noticed that the show was more unique than any of the shows I’d seen because it actually kind of held true to us as artists; it didn’t really try to make us seem any different than what we really are,” he explained, “like they were very open to the fact that I was in a band and I was trying to lead that band, and they didn’t try and just make me who they thought I could be. [We’re] all unique individual artists, and The Voice promotes that instead of tries to hide it.”

Stay tuned to see how Terry, Devyn, Daniel, Bryan and Joe develop on their respective teams – and find out who joins them when we resume Season 3 blind auditions next Monday, September 17 at 8 PM ET/PT on NBC.